Alibi Junior High Read online

  “Tell me, is it true, Mr. Saron?”

  “Um, no, it’s not true.”

  She leans forward and looks me in the eye. “Why do you suppose so many of your teachers would mention a discipline problem if it wasn’t true?”

  That’s a good question. Did she make that stuff up or did my dad put it in my records? Why would my dad do that? Then I remember how he’s always stressing the importance of hard work and discipline. Yeah, that’s it. He put it there to make sure everyone pushes me hard and keeps me honest. That’s my dad.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Saron, did I say something you find amusing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That smirk on your face. I suggest you wipe it off.”

  I didn’t realize I was smirking.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Owens, but really, I wasn’t smirking.”

  “It sure looked like you were to me. Let’s get a few things straight here. Number one, we have a zero-tolerance policy for violence. You fight and you’re automatically suspended. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Absolutely no weapons of any kind are to ever enter our school. Violation of that rule will get you kicked out of school permanently. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  No weapons? That’s just great. What happens if someone comes after me at school? Is Steroid Steve going to protect me?

  “We have a code of conduct on the first page of our student handbook. You’re expected to read it, know it, and follow it. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Owens just stares at me for a while. I feel like she’s sizing me up, arriving at some kind of a conclusion.

  “I certainly hope that you and I are going to get along. I like to run a tight ship. I do not want any trouble from you, young man. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She rises to her feet. “Oh, one more thing. I’ve been wondering—you’ve always attended private schools. Why the switch to a public school now?”

  I remember the blue car, running through the café, the huge explosion, the smell of smoke and burnt flesh, the dead and the dying, the severed arm, the waitress’s lifeless eyes.

  “Um, well…my dad’s got some problems with his business, so we had to make some changes.”

  She walks around her desk and mumbles “Sorry to hear that,” before extending her hand and giving me what I can only assume is a smile. “Let me be the first to say, welcome to Northridge Junior High.”

  Another hour passes before I’m able to get out of the offices. I’m sent to my guidance counselor, Miss DeNitto, an extremely hyper little woman who drinks way too much coffee. She’s also one of the most unorganized people I’ve ever met. The first five minutes of our meeting is spent looking for her glasses.

  After we find her glasses, which were next to the coffee maker, she hunts for and finds with slightly less difficulty my class schedule. I’m impressed. Judging by the state of her desk, which is piled high with folders and paper, I had serious doubts that she would ever find it.

  We spend at least fifteen minutes in her closet-size office, going over every little detail of my schedule. She shows me the teacher’s name, the name of the class, the location of the class, she highlights the number of the classroom. She even brings out a map of the school and highlights a route for me to follow so I don’t get lost.

  I’ve just spent a week traveling around the world, following plane, train, and bus schedules, yet I’m being treated like the most difficult journey I’ll ever have to undertake in my life is the one between Spanish and history.

  Miss DeNitto gives me a huge smile. “Any more questions about your class schedule?”

  “Uh, no, I think you’ve covered just about everything.”

  I look at the schedule and it hits me that I’ll actually have to go to all these classes. Every single day I’ll be expected to be someplace at a certain time. I’ve never had to do anything like that before. I try to imagine what it will be like and the only thing that comes to mind is a sink slowly dripping in the night, driving you insane.

  I stand to leave.

  “Mr. Saron, we’re not quite done here. I’m required to go over the student handbook with you.”

  I sit back down.

  We go over the handbook, page by page, or should I say Miss DeNitto goes over the handbook. I sit by her side and grunt at the appropriate times. It’s endless, simplistic, and incredibly boring. That sink has started to drip.

  My mind drifts. I wish I were back at the cottage with Aunt Jenny. Yesterday she showed me a bunch of old photographs. The one I really liked was a picture of my mother and Jenny wading in a lake with my dad. It looked like they weren’t much older than me. They all had their pant legs pulled up and large smiles stretched across their faces. There was a happiness in my dad’s eyes that I’d never seen before.

  I asked her if I could keep it. I put it in a little wooden frame. It’s on my nightstand next to the alarm clock.

  Something catches my eye. A girl walks into the outer office. I can’t stop looking at her. She glides across the room; it’s like she owns the space that surrounds her. I’m drawn to her smile, her hair, those big brown eyes.

  She’s beautiful.

  One of the secretaries is talking to her. They’re laughing. The girl reaches for something and then jumps back, the secretary springs to her feet. There’s a large cup of coffee on its side. The brown expanding puddle quickly overtakes papers on the desk. Everyone’s frantically running for paper towels.

  “Cody?”

  “Um, yeah?”

  “Are you paying attention?”

  I turn away from the coffee cup circus. “What? Oh, yeah, sure. Passes in the hall.”

  She stands up and closes the handbook. “I guess that’s it. Any questions?”

  I rise to my feet and motion at the girl running with the paper towels. “I was wondering if you know who that girl is?”

  Miss DeNitto looks across the room. “Which one?”

  “Um, the one who just knocked over the potted plant.”

  “Oh, that’s Renee Carrington. She helps out around the office. She’s a bit of a klutz but she’s a really sweet girl. Would you like to meet her?”

  I look across the room. The secretary’s still mopping up the coffee from her desk. Renee is on her hands and knees scooping potting soil off the floor. The plant that used to occupy the pot looks hopelessly mangled. She has a huge apologetic smile stretched across her face.

  I don’t think anyone has ever looked better.

  “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

  There’s this ball of fear that suddenly grows in my chest and quickly spreads through my body. It’s a different type of fear than I’m used to. This kind robs your self-confidence and keeps words from forming on your tongue. I suddenly can’t think of anything I could talk to her about. There’s not a doubt in my mind that if I were to meet her right now I’d just stand there like a mindless, wordless zombie.

  I put on my most confident smile. “Oh, that’s okay. Maybe later. I think I’d like to…you know, uh, go to my classes or something.”

  Fifteen right, twenty-six left, right eight, and…nothing!

  I kick the locker. I can’t believe it. I’ve been trying to open this thing forever. I check the number again. Nope, it’s the right locker. I check the card Miss DeNitto gave me. Nope, I’m dialing the right numbers. This combination must be wrong. I give it another kick, this time even harder.

  “Young man! Is there a problem here?” I jump and turn around. There’s an angry teacher standing a few feet away from me. She has the type of face that’s ageless; it’s impossible to tell whether she’s twenty-five or forty-five.

  I mumble, “No problem, just trying to open this locker.”

  “Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

  A small crowd starts to form around us. I hear a girl say to her friend, “Look at his shorts and socks.” They both laugh.
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br />   I try to speak louder but it comes out sounding more like a shout. “I’m just trying to open this locker!”

  “Kicking it is not the way to open it. Did you try the combination?”

  I throw up my arms. “Of course I tried the combination. It doesn’t work.”

  “Did you spin past the second number?”

  I try to keep the frustration out of my voice but it bleeds through. “Of course I did. What do I look like, an idiot?”

  Mrs. Ageless takes the card out of my hand and quickly spins the numbers. The door clicks open. Everyone laughs like she just pulled an elephant out of a hat.

  I raise my hand; at first Mrs. Smith ignores me but then she looks my way. “What is it now, Mr. Saron?”

  I rise to my feet. “Actually the First World War wasn’t really the first world war. Many scholars consider it to be the eighth. You had the Nine Years’ War, the War of Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, then you had the War of American Rev—”

  “Mr. Saron!”

  I look at Mrs. Smith. She seems very annoyed. “Yes?”

  “Didn’t I tell you before to stop interrupting me?”

  “I raised my hand.”

  She grabs a pen and paper off her desk and starts writing something on it. I can tell she’s really angry, although I’m not sure what I did wrong. Then she marches across the room and slaps the paper into my hand.

  “I want you to take this to Mrs. Owens’s office.”

  The class starts making Ooooh sounds. Mrs. Smith barks, “Quiet! There will be none of that!”

  I gather my books and quickly glance around the room. Everyone seems to be happy that I’m getting kicked out of class. I don’t understand why. The girl I saw in the office, the beautiful one, Renee Carrington, isn’t even looking at me; she’s just drawing something in her notebook. I don’t think I’ve impressed her. Figures.

  As I walk past her desk she looks up at me and it’s as if something explodes inside me. I’m not sure if I should smile, nod, or keep my face expressionless. I can feel my brain firing all these different thoughts at the same time.

  Her eyes are so beautiful.

  Something suddenly catches my foot and I feel myself stumbling forward. I come close to falling but awkwardly manage to stay on my feet.

  Everyone starts to laugh and I quickly turn my eyes to the door and move toward it. All I want in this world right now is to be out of this room.

  I look at my plate. “Excuse me, what is this?”

  The older woman runs the back of her gloved hand across her forehead and then adjusts her hairnet. She snorts. “It’s lunch.”

  I stare at the red ooze leaking out of a bun. “No, really, what do you call it?”

  “It’s the Cowboy Burger.”

  I pick up the tray and examine the burger, trying to figure out what’s inside. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before. “What’s in a Cowboy Burger?”

  A tall kid behind me lets out a long, exaggerated sigh and says, “It’s like a Sloppy Joe.”

  “What’s a Sloppy Joe?”

  He rolls his eyes. “You’ve never had a Sloppy Joe?”

  “Of course not. What’s in it?”

  “How can you not have ever had a Sloppy Joe? I thought everyone knows what Sloppy Joes are. It’s you know, like hamburger, but mushy like chili and not as spicy. Kind of like meat sauce.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “And whose idea was it to put it on a roll? How do you eat it?”

  He picks up his tray and walks around me. “Listen, I don’t care if you eat it. I just want to eat my lunch.”

  There are a few things I’m familiar with and I pile them onto my tray. It looks like my lunch will mainly consist of side dishes and desserts.

  I’m waiting in line at the register when the comments start again. “Mr. Shorty Shorts” and your basic “Socks” seem to be the most common. I find that just ignoring them seems to work best, but it’s hard. I look at my “Sloppy Joe” there are things I’d love to do with it and none of them involves me putting it into my mouth.

  After paying for my lunch, I look around for someplace to sit. It’s strange, the way the seating arrangement works out. It’s not like anyone is telling me where I can and can’t sit, but people have a way of looking at you that keeps you moving along.

  In the end I sit by myself in the corner.

  I’m hurrying down a hallway. This doesn’t make any sense. There are two floors and three blocks, A block, B block, and C block, but they’re not in order. It should go A, B, C, right? Not A, C, B. And these numbers! If you’re going to number rooms, you should number them in order. Not odd numbers here, even there.

  The bell goes off. I’m late again.

  I take out the map that Miss DeNitto made for me. I study it and wonder why I can’t seem to figure out where I am. Two girls walk past me. I’m about to ask them for help when one of them says, “Hey, it’s Mr. Shorty Shorts.” They giggle as they walk away.

  The hall quickly empties. Doors are closing all around me. I’m alone in a hall that twenty seconds ago was packed with kids. When the last door closes the sound echoes. I stand there feeling even more lost. I’m overwhelmed by a sense of frustrating incompetence. I’ve never felt anything like this before.

  THREADING A NEEDLE WITH WORDS

  I wait for the bus to drive off before swinging my backpack over my shoulder. I look up and notice Jenny waiting for me in her Jeep. It’s idling on the side of the road and I can hear faint music. She offers me a quick wave and a welcoming grin.

  I open the door and heave my full backpack into the backseat before plopping down beside her.

  “Hey, Cody! How was your first day of school?”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t. I’m too angry. I just sit there and stare out the window, listening to one of her mindless pop songs on the radio.

  After a while she lets out a huge, almost comical, sigh. “Oh, come on. I’m dying to know. Tell me about your school.”

  I explode. “You really want to know? It’s stupid! That’s what it is. I hate that place. It’s so stupid!”

  She turns off the Jeep, places her hand gently on my shoulder, and turns toward me. “Hey, what’s going on? Talk to me.”

  “I hate that place. It’s so stupid!”

  “Yes, you said that. Now tell me why.”

  “Why? Where do I start? Everything about it is stupid.” I point at my full backpack in the rear seat, and my voice grows even louder. “Look at that thing. My dad and I hiked over the Andes with smaller packs than that! It’s insane!”

  “I’m sorry, hon. Do you have a lot of homework?”

  “No! That’s the stupid part of it. I just have a lot of books! Teachers want me to read two pages from one book and one page from another. Before you know it, I’m hauling around forty pounds of books to read twenty pages. It’s so stupid!”

  Jenny rubs my shoulder. “Hey, calm down. It’s all going to work out. Maybe you could read ahead or something like that.”

  She twitches her nose and backs away a little. “Um, by the way, are you wearing…really strong perfume?”

  I throw up my arms. “Still? I’ve heard that all day! Don’t get me started. I do not want to talk about Cell Phone Girl!”

  “Cell Phone Girl?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about Cell Phone Girl!”

  She holds up her hands defensively. “Fine, fine. We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

  I fume. “That girl’s just plain evil. I bet the walls turn black when she walks into a room.”

  “No problem. We don’t have to talk about her. We’ll talk about something else. How about your teachers? Did you like your teachers?”

  “Like my teachers? Are you serious? I have no idea if I like them or not, because they kept kicking me out of class and sending me to the assistant principal’s office.”

  “You got sent to the
office? What did you do?”

  “Why do you assume I did something wrong?”

  She raises her eyebrows. “Well, normally that’s how it works—you do something wrong, and then they send you to the office.”

  “Apparently, you don’t have to do something wrong. Like in Spanish class, she kept correcting my Spanish over and over again. It was so aggravating. Finally I switched completely over to Spanish and asked her where she learned the language. She said the University of Wisconsin. I told her that maybe that’s how they speak Spanish in Wisconsin but in South America, Europe, and the rest of the world, they speak it like I do.”

  Jenny bursts out laughing, then quickly pulls herself together. “Seriously? You really said that?”

  “I did. I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Cody. You have to treat your teachers with respect.”

  “Treat them with respect? When they try to tell me something’s right and it’s wrong, what am I supposed to do? Just sit there and nod my head?”

  Jenny stares at me for a while. I guess she’s thinking, then she takes a deep breath and in an overly calm voice asks, “Cody…how many times did you get sent to the office?”

  “Including the time the security guard dragged me there?”

  Her eyes blink for a while. It reminds me of a radio searching for a signal. “Yes…including the security guard.”

  “Four times.”

  “Four times? Are you kidding me? Who gets sent to the office four times?”

  “I guess I do.”

  Jenny shakes her head and starts up the Jeep. I can tell she’s mad. We drive to the cottage in silence. I think I’d prefer if she yelled. She turns on the radio and it plays soft and low like a movie soundtrack.

  I stare out the window and wonder what my dad’s doing right now. I look at my watch; he’s probably having a late lunch. We used to have the best lunches together. Restaurants would treat us like royalty. My dad has this great way of talking to people; he could thread a needle with words if he had to.